John Muir Writings

The Story of My Boyhood and Youth

by John Muir

Chapter VI
The Ploughboy

AT
first, wheat, corn, and potatoes were the principal crops we raised;
wheat especially. But in four or five years the soil was so exhausted that
only five or six bushels an acre, even in the better fields, was obtained,
although when first ploughed twenty and twenty-five bushels was about the
ordinary yield. More attention was then paid to corn, but without fertilizers
the corn-crop also became very meager. At last it was discovered that English
clover would grow on even the exhausted fields, and that when ploughed
under and planted with corn, or even wheat, wonderful crops were raised.
This caused a complete change in farming methods; the farmers raised fertilizing
clover, planted corn, and fed the crop to cattle and hogs.

But no crop raised in our wilderness was so surprisingly rich and sweet
and purely generous to us boys and, indeed, to everybody as the watermelons
and muskmelons. We planted a large patch on a sunny hill-slope the very
first spring, and it seemed miraculous that a few handfuls of little fat
seeds should in a few months send up a hundred wagon-loads of
crisp, sumptuous, red-hearted and yellow-hearted fruits covering all the
hill. We soon learned to know when they were in their prime, and when over-ripe
and mealy. Also that if a second crop was taken from the same ground without
fertilizing it, the melons would be small and what we called soapy; that
is, soft and smooth, utterly uncrisp, and without a trace of the lively
freshness and sweetness of those raised on virgin soil. Coming in from
the farm work at noon, the half-dozen or so of melons we had placed in
our cold spring were a glorious luxury that only weary barefooted farm
boys can ever know.

Spring was not very trying as to temperature, and refreshing rains fell
at short intervals. The work of ploughing commenced as soon as the frost
was out of the ground. Corn- and potato-planting and the sowing of spring
wheat was comparatively light work, while the nesting birds sang cheerily,
grass and flowers covered the marshes and meadows and all the wild, uncleared
parts of the farm, and the trees put forth their new leases, those of the
oaks forming beautiful purple masses as if every leaf were a petal; and
with all this we enjoyed the mild soothing winds, the hung of innumerable
small insects and hylas, and the freshness and fragrance of
everything. Then, too, came the wonderful passenger pigeons streaming from
the south, and flocks of geese and cranes, filling all the sky with whistling
wings.

The summer work, on the contrary, was deadly heavy, especially harvesting
and corn-hoeing. All the ground had to be hoed over for the first few years,
before father bought cultivators or small weed-covering ploughs, and we
were not allowed a moment’s rest. The hoes had to be kept working up and
down as steadily as if they were moved by machinery. Ploughing for winter
wheat was comparatively easy, when we walked barefooted in the furrows,
while the fine autumn tints kindled in the woods, and the hillsides were
covered with golden pumpkins.

In summer the chores were grinding scythes, feeding the animals, chopping
stove-wood, and carrying water up the hill from the spring on the edge
of the meadow, etc. Then breakfast, and to the harvest or hay-field. I
was foolishly ambitious to be first in mowing and cradling, and by the
time I was sixteen led all the hired men. An hour was allowed at noon for
dinner and more chores we stayed in the field until dark, then supper,
and still more chores, family worship, and to bed; making altogether a
hard, sweaty day of about sixteen or seventeen hours. Think
of that, ye blessed eight-hour-day laborers!

In winter father came to the foot of the stairs and called us at six
o’clock to feed the horses and cattle, grind axes, bring in wood, and do
any other chores required, then breakfast, and out to work in the mealy,
frosty snow by daybreak, chopping, fencing, etc. So in general our winter
work was about as restless and trying as that of the long-day summer. No
matter what the weather, there was always something to do. During heavy
rains or snow-storms we worked in the barn, shelling corn, fanning wheat,
thrashing with the flail, making axe-handles or ox-yokes, mending things,
or sprouting and sorting potatoes in the cellar.

No pains were taken to diminish or in any way soften the natural hardships
of this pioneer farm life; nor did any of the Europeans seem to know how
to find reasonable ease and comfort if they would. The very best oak and
hickory fuel was embarrassingly abundant and cost nothing but cutting and
common sense; but instead of hauling great heart-cheering loads of it for
wide, open, all-welcoming, climate-changing, beauty-making, Godlike ingle-fires,
it was hauled with weary heart-breaking industry into fences and waste
places to get it out of the way of the plough, and out of the way of
doing good. The only fire for the whole house was the kitchen stove, with
a fire-box about eighteen inches long and eight inches wide and deep,—scant
space for three or four small sticks, around which in hard zero weather
all the family of ten persons shivered, and beneath which in the morning
we found our socks and coarse, soggy boots frozen solid. We were not allowed
to start even this despicable little fire in its black box to thaw them.
No, we had to squeeze our throbbing, aching, chilblained feet into them,
causing greater pain than toothache, and hurry out to chores. Fortunately
the miserable chilblain pain began to abate as soon as the temperature
of our feet approached the freezing-point, enabling us in spite of hard
work and hard frost to enjoy the winter beauty,—the wonderful radiance
of the snow when it was starry with crystals, and the dawns and the sunsets
and white noons, and the cheery, enlivening company of the brave chickadees
and nuthatches.

The winter stars far surpassed those of our stormy Scotland in brightness,
and we gazed and gazed as though we had never seen stars before. Oftentimes
the heavens were made still more glorious by auroras, the long lance rays,
called “Merry Dancers” in Scotland, streaming with startling
tremulous motion to the zenith. Usually the electric auroral
light is white or pale yellow, but in the third or fourth of our Wisconsin
winters there was a magnificently colored aurora that was seen and admired
over nearly all the continent. The whole sky was draped in graceful purple
and crimson folds glorious beyond description. Father called us out into
the yard in front of the house where we had a wide view, crying, “Come!
Come, mother! Come, bairns! and see the glory of God. All the sky is clad
in a robe of red light. Look straight up to the crown where the folds are
gathered. Hush and wonder and adore, for surely this is the clothing of
the Lord Himself, and perhaps He will even now appear looking down from
his high heaven.” This celestial show was far more glorious than anything
we had ever yet beheld, and throughout that wonderful winter hardly anything
else was spoken of.

We even enjoyed the snowstorms, the thronging crystals, like daisies,
coming down separate and distinct, were very different from the tufted
flakes we enjoyed so much in Scotland, when we ran into the midst of the
slow-falling feathery throng shouting with enthusiasm: “Jennie’s plucking
her doos! Jennie’s plucking her doos!” (doves).

Nature has many ways of thinning and pruning and trimming
her forests,—lightning-strokes, heavy snow, and storm-winds to shatter
and blow down whole trees here and there or break off branches as required.
The results of these methods I have observed in different forests, but
only once have I seen pruning by rain. The rain froze on the trees as it
fell and grew so thick and heavy that many of them lost a third or more
of their branches. The view of the woods after the storm had passed and
the sun shone forth was something never to be forgotten. Every twig and
branch and rugged trunk was encased in pure crystal ice, and each oak and
hickory and willow became a fairy crystal palace. Such dazzling brilliance,
such effects of white light and irised light glowing and flashing I had
never seen before, nor have I since. This sudden change of the leafless
woods to glowing silver was, like the great aurora, spoken of for years,
and is one of the most beautiful of the many pictures that enriches my
life. And besides the great shows there were thousands of others even in
the coldest weather manifesting the utmost fineness and tenderness of beauty
and affording noble compensation for hardship and pain.

One of the most striking of the winter sounds was the loud roaring and
rumbling of the ice on our lake, from its shrinking and expanding
with the changes of the weather. The fishermen who were catching pickerel
said that they had no luck when this roaring was going on above the fish.
I remember how frightened we boys were when on one of our New Year holidays
we were taking a walk on the ice and heard for the first time the sudden
rumbling roar beneath our feet and running on ahead of us, creaking and
whooping as if all the ice eighteen or twenty inches thick was breaking.

In the neighborhood of our Wisconsin farm there were extensive swamps
consisting in great part of a thick sod of very tough carex roots covering
thin, watery lakes of mud. They originated in glacier lakes that were gradually
overgrown. This sod was so tough that oxen with loaded wagons could be
driven over it without cutting down through it, although it was afloat.
The carpenters who came to build our frame house, noticing how the sedges
sunk beneath their feet, said that if they should break through, they would
probably be well on their way to California before touching bottom. On
the contrary, all these lake-basins are shallow as compared with their
width. When we went into the Wisconsin woods there was not a single wheel-track
or cattle-track. The only man-made road was an Indian trail along the Fox
River between Portage and Packwauckee Lake. Of course the deer,
foxes, badgers, coons, skunks, and even the squirrels had well-beaten tracks
from their dens and hiding-places in thickets, hollow trees, and the ground,
but they did not reach far, and but little noise was made by the soft-footed
travelers in passing over them, only a slight rustling and swishing among
fallen leaves and grass.

Corduroying the swamps formed the principal part of road-making among
the early settlers for many a day. At these annual road-making gatherings
opportunity was offered for discussion of the news, politics, religion,
war, the state of the crops, comparative advantages of the new country
over the old, and so forth, but the principal opportunities, recurring
every week, were the hours after Sunday church services. I remember hearing
long talks on the wonderful beauty of the Indian corn; the wonderful melons,
so wondrous fine for “sloken a body on hot days”; their contempt
for tomatoes, so fine to look at with their sunny colors and so disappointing
in taste; the miserable cucumbers the “Yankee bodies” ate, though
tasteless as rushes; the character of the Yankees, etcetera. Then there
were long discussions about the Russian war, news of which was eagerly
gleaned from Greeley’s “New York Tribune”; the great battles
of the Alma, the charges at Balaklava and Inkerman; the siege
of Sebastopol; the military genius of Todleben; the character of Nicholas;
the character of the Russian soldier, his stubborn bravery, who for the
first time in history withstood the British bayonet charges; the probable
outcome of the terrible war; the fate of Turkey, and so forth.

Very few of our old-country neighbors gave much heed to what are called
spirit-rappings. On the contrary, they were regarded as a sort of
sleight-of-hand humbug.
Some of these spirits seem to be stout able-bodied fellows, judging
by the weights they lift and the heavy furniture they bang about. But they
do no good work that I know of; never saw wood, grind corn, cook, feed
the hungry, or go to the help of poor sinuous mothers at the bedsides of
their sick children. I noticed when I was a boy that it was not the strongest
characters who followed so-called mediums. When a rapping-storm was at
its height in Wisconsin, one of our neighbors, an old Scotchman, remarked,
“Thay puir silly medium-bodies may gang to the deil wi’ their rappin’
speerits, for they dae nae gude, and I think the deil’s their fayther.”

Although in the spring of 1849 there was no other settler within a radius
of four miles of our Fountain Luke farm,
in three or four years almost
every quarter-section of government land was taken up, mostly by enthusiastic
home-seekers from Great Britain, with only here and there Yankee families
from adjacent states, who had come drifting indefinitely westward in covered
wagons, seeking their fortunes like winged seeds; all alike striking root
and gripping the glacial drift soil as naturally as oak and hickory trees;
happy and hopeful, establishing homes and making wider and wider fields
in the hospitable wilderness. The axe and plough were kept very busy; cattle,
horses, sheep, and pigs multiplied; barns and corn-cribs were filled up,
and man and beast were well fed; a schoolhouse was built, which was used
also for a church; and in a very short time the new country began to look
like an old one.

Comparatively few of the first settlers suffered from serious accidents.
One of our neighbors had a finger shot off, and on a bitter, frosty night
had to be taken to a surgeon in Portage, in a sled drawn by slow, plodding
oxen, to have the shattered stump dressed. Another fell from his wagon
and was killed by the wheel passing over his body. An acre of ground was
reserved and fenced for graves, and soon consumption came to fill it. One
of the saddest instances was that of a Scotch family from Edinburgh, consisting
of a father, son, and daughter, who settled on eighty acres
of land within half a mile of our place. The daughter died of consumption
the third year after their arrival, the son one or two years later, and
at last the father followed his two children. Thus sadly ended bright hopes
and dreams of a happy home in rich and free America.

Another neighbor, I remember, after a lingering illness died of the
same disease in mid-winter, and his funeral was attended by the neighbors
in sleighs during a driving snowstorm when the thermometer was fifteen
or twenty degrees below zero. The great white plague carried off another
of our near neighbors, a fine Scotchman, the father of eight promising
boys, when he was only about forty-five years of age. Most of those who
suffered from this disease seemed hopeful and cheerful up to a very short
time before their death, but Mr. Reid, I remember, on one of his last visits
to our house, said with brave resignation: “I know that never more
in this world can I be well, but I must just submit. I must just submit.”

One of the saddest deaths from other causes than consumption was that
of a poor feeble-minded man whose brother, a sturdy, devout, severe puritan,
was a very hard taskmaster. Poor half-witted Charlie was kept steadily
at work,—although he was not able to do much, for his body
was about as feeble as his mind. He never could be taught the right use
of an axe, and when he was set to chopping down trees for firewood he feebly
hacked and chipped round and round them, sometimes spending several days
in nibbling down a tree that a beaver might have gnawed down in half the
time. Occasionally when he had an extra large tree to chop, he would go
home and report that the tree was too tough and strong for him and that
he could never make it fall. Then his brother, calling him a useless creature,
would fell it with a few well-directed strokes, and leave Charlie to nibble
away-at it for weeks trying to make it into stove-wood.

His guardian brother, delighting in hard work and able for anything,
was as remarkable for strength of body and mind as poor Charlie for childishness.
All the neighbors pitied Charlie, especially the women, who never missed
an opportunity to give him kind words, cookies, and pie; above all, they
bestowed natural sympathy on the poor imbecile as if he were an unfortunate
motherless child. In particular, his nearest neighbors, Scotch Highlanders,
warmly welcomed him to their home and never wearied in doing everything
that tender sympathy could suggest. To those friends he ran gladly at every
opportunity. But after years of suffering from overwork and
illness his feeble health failed, and he told his Scotch friends one day
that he was not able to work any more or do anything that his brother wanted
him to do, that he was tired of life, and that he had come to thank them
for their kindness and to bid them good-bye, for he was going to drown
himself in Muir’s lake. “Oh, Charlie! Charlie!” they cried,
“you must n’t talk that way. Cheer up! You will soon be stronger.
We all love you. Cheer up! Cheer up! And always come here whenever you
need anything."

"Oh, no! my friends,” he pathetically replied, “I know
you love me, but I can’t cheer up any more. My heart’s gone, and I want
to die."

Next day, when Mr. Anderson, a carpenter whose house was on the west
shore of our lake, was going to a spring he saw a man wade out through
the rushes and lily-pads and throw himself forward into deep water. This
was poor Charlie. Fortunately, Mr. Anderson had a skiff close by, and as
the distance was not great he reached the broken-hearted imbecile in time
to save his life, and after trying to cheer him took him home to his brother.
But even this terrible proof of despair failed to soften his brother. He
seemed to regard the attempt at suicide simply as a crime calculated to
bring harm to religion. Though snatched from the lake to his
bed, poor Charlie lived only a few days longer. A physician who was called
when his health first became seriously impaired reported that he was suffering
from Bright’s disease. After all was over, the stoical brother walked over
to the neighbor who had saved Charlie from drowning, and, after talking
on ordinary affairs, crops, the weather, etc., said in a careless tone:
“I have a little job of carpenter work for you, Mr. Anderson.”
“What is it, Mr.——?” “I want you to make a coffin.”
“A coffin!” said the startled carpenter. “Who is dead?”
“Charlie,” he coolly replied. All the neighbors were in tears
over the poor child man’s fate. But, strange to say, the brother who had
faithfully cared for him controlled and concealed all his natural affection
as incompatible with sound faith.

The mixed lot of settlers around us offered a favorable field for observation
of the different kinds of people of our own race. We were swift to note
the way they behaved, the differences in their religion and morals, and
in their ways of drawing a living from the same kind of soil under the
same general conditions; how they protected themselves from the weather;
how they were influenced by new doctrines and old ones seen in new lights
in preaching, lecturing, debating, bringing up their children,
etc., and how they regarded the Indians, those first settlers and owners
of the ground that was being made into farms.

I well remember my father’s discussing with a Scotch neighbor, a Mr.
George Mair, the Indian question as to the rightful ownership of the soil.
Mr. Mair remarked one day that it was pitiful to see how the unfortunate
Indians, children of Nature, living on the natural products of the soil,
hunting, fishing, and even cultivating small corn-fields on the most fertile
spots, were now being robbed of their lands and pushed ruthlessly back
into narrower and narrower limits by alien races who were cutting off their
means of livelihood. Father replied that surely it could never have been
the intention of God to allow Indians to rove and hunt over so fertile
a country and hold it forever in unproductive wildness, while Scotch and
Irish and English farmers could put it to so much better use. Where an
Indian required thousands of acres for his funnily, these acres in the
hands of industrious, God-fearing farmers would support ten or a hundred
times more people in a far worthier manner, while at the same time helping
to spread the gospel.

Mr. Mair urged that such farming as our first immigrants were practicing
was in many ways rude and full of the mistakes of ignorance,
yet, rude as it was, and ill-tilled as were most of our Wisconsin farms
by unskillful, inexperienced settlers who had been merchants and mechanics
and servants in the old countries, how should we like to have specially
trained and educated farmers drive us out of our homes and farms, such
as they were, making use of the same argument, that God could never have
intended such ignorant, unprofitable, devastating farmers as we were to
occupy land upon which scientific farmers could raise five or ten times
as much on each acre as we did? And I well remember thinking that Mr. Mair
had the better side of the argument. It then seemed to me that, whatever
the final outcome might be, it was at this stage of the fight only an example
of the rule of might with but little or no thought for the right or welfare
of the other fellow if he were the weaker; that “they should take
who had the power, and they should keep who can,” as Wordsworth makes
the marauding Scottish Highlanders say.

Many of our old neighbors toiled and sweated and grubbed themselves
into their graves years before their natural dying days, in getting a living
on a quarter-section of land and vaguely trying to get rich, while bread
and raiment might have been serenely won on less than a fourth
of this land, and time gained to get better acquainted with God.

I was put to the plough at the age of twelve, when my head reached but
little above the handles, and for many years I had to do the greater part
of the ploughing. It was hard work for so small a boy; nevertheless, as
good ploughing was exacted from me as if I were a man, and very soon I
had to become a good plough-man, or rather ploughboy. None could draw a
straighter furrow. For the first few years the work was particularly hard
on account of the tree-stumps that had to be dodged. Later the stumps were
all dug and chopped out to make way for the McCormick reaper, and because
I proved to be the best chopper and stump-digger I had nearly all of it
to myself. It was dull, hard work leaning over on my knees all day,
chopping out those tough oak and hickory stumps, deep down below the crowns
of the big roots. Some, though fortunately not many, were two feet or more
in diameter.

And as I was the eldest boy, the greater part of all the other hard
work of the farm quite naturally fell on me. I had to split rails for long
lines of zigzag fences. The trees that were tall enough and straight enough
to afford one or two logs ten feet long were used for rails, the others,
too knotty or cross-grained, were disposed of in log and cordwood
fences. Making rails was hard work and required no little skill. I used
to cut and split a hundred a day from our short, knotty oak timber, swinging
the axe and heavy mallet, often with sore hands, from early morning to
night. Father was not successful as a rail-splitter. After trying the work
with me a day or two, he in despair left it all to me. I rather liked it,
for I was proud of my skill, and tried to believe that I was as tough as
the timber I mauled, though this and other heavy jobs stopped my growth
and earned for me the title “Runt of the family."

In those early days, long before the great labor-saving machines came
to our help, almost everything connected with wheat-raising abounded in
trying work,—cradling in the long, sweaty dog-days, raking and binding,
stacking, thrashing,—and it often seemed to me that our fierce, over-industrious
way of getting the grain from the ground was too closely connected with
grave-digging. The staff of life, naturally beautiful, oftentimes suggested
the gravedigger’s spade. Men and boys, and in those days even women and
girls, were cut down while cutting the wheat. The fat folk grew lean and
the lean leaner, while the rosy cheeks brought from Scotland and other
cool countries across the sea faded to yellow like the wheat.
We were all made slaves through the vice of over-industry. The same was
in great part true in making hay to keep the cattle and horses through
the long winters. We were called in the morning at four o’clock and seldom
got to bed before nine, making a broiling, seething day seventeen hours
long loaded with heavy work, while I was only a small stunted boy; and
a few years later my brothers David and Daniel and my older sisters had
to endure about as much as I did. In the harvest dog-days and dog-nights
and dog-mornings, when we arose from our clammy beds, our cotton shirts
clung to our backs as wet with sweat as the bathing-suits of swimmers,
and remained so all the long, sweltering days. In mowing and cradling,
the most exhausting of all the farm work, I made matters worse by foolish
ambition in keeping ahead of the hired men. Never a warning word was spoken
of the dangers of over-work. On the contrary, even when sick we were held
to our tasks as long as we could stand. Once in harvest-time I had the
mumps and was unable to swallow any food except milk, but this was not
allowed to make any difference, while I staggered with weakness and sometimes
fell headlong among the sheaves. Only once was I allowed to leave the harvest-field—when
I was stricken down with pneumonia. I lay gasping for weeks,
but the Scotch are hard to kill and I pulled through. No physician was
called, for father was an enthusiast, and always said and believed that
God and hard work were by far the best doctors.

None of our neighbors were so excessively industrious as father; though
nearly all of the Scotch, English, and Irish worked too hard, trying to
make good homes and to lay up money enough for comfortable independence.
Excepting small garden-patches, few of them had owned land in the old country.
Here their craving land-hunger was satisfied, and they were naturally proud
of their farms and tried to keep them as neat and clean and well-tilled
as gardens. To accomplish this without the means for hiring help was impossible.
Flowers were planted about the neatly kept log or frame houses; barnyards,
granaries, etc., were kept in about as neat order as the homes, and the
fences and corn-rows were rigidly straight. But every uncut weed distressed
them; so also did every ungathered ear of grain, and all that was lost
by birds and gophers; and this overcarefulness bred endless work and worry.

As for money, for many a year there was precious little of it in the
country for anybody. Eggs sold at six cents a dozen in trade, and
five-cent calico was exchanged at twenty-five cents a yard. Wheat
brought fifty cents a bushel in trade. To get cash for it before the Portage
Railway was built, it had to be hauled to Milwaukee, a hundred miles away.
On the other hand, food was abundant—eggs, chickens, pigs, cattle, wheat,
corn, potatoes, garden vegetables of the best, and wonderful melons as
luxuries. No other wild country I have ever known extended a kinder welcome
to poor immigrants. On the arrival in the spring, a log house could be
built, a few acres ploughed, the virgin sod planted with corn, potatoes,
etc., and enough raised to keep a family comfortably the very first year;
and wild hay for cows and oxen grew in abundance on the numerous meadows.
The American settlers were wisely content with smaller fields and less
of everything, kept indoors during excessively hot or cold weather, rested
when tired, went off fishing and hunting at the most favorable times and
seasons of the day and year, gathered nuts and berries, and in general
tranquilly accepted all the good things the fertile wilderness offered.

After eight years of this dreary work of clearing the Fountain Lake
farm, fencing it and getting it in perfect order, building a frame house
and the necessary outbuildings for the cattle and horses,—after all this
had been victoriously accomplished, and we had made out to escape
with life,—father bought a half-section of wild land about four or five
miles to the eastward and began all over again to clear and fence and break
up other fields for a new farm doubling all the stunting, heartbreaking
chopping, grubbing, stump-digging, rail-splitting, fence-building,
barn-building, house-building, and so forth.

By this time I had learned to run the breaking plough. Most of these
ploughs were very large, turning furrows from eighteen inches to two feet
wide, and were drawn by four or five yoke of oxen. They were used only
for the first ploughing, in breaking up the wild sod woven into a tough
mass, chiefly by the cordlike roots of perennial grasses, reinforced by
the tap-roots of oak and hickory bushes, called “grubs,” some
of which were more than a century old and four or five inches in diameter.
In the hardest ploughing on the most difficult ground, the grubs were said
to be as thick as the hair on a dog’s back. If in good trim, the plough
cut through and turned over these grubs as if the century-old wood were
soft like the flesh of carrots and turnips; but if not in good trim the
grubs promptly tossed the plough out of the ground. A stout Highland Scot,
our neighbor, whose plough was in bad order and who did not know how to
trim it, was vainly trying to keep it in the ground by main
strength, while his son, who was driving and merrily whipping up the cattle,
would cry encouragingly, “Haud her in, fayther! Haud her in!”

"But hoo i’ the deil can I haud her in when she’ll no stop
in?” his perspiring father would reply, gasping for breath between
each word. On the contrary, with the share and coulter sharp and nicely
adjusted, the plough, instead of shying at every grub and jumping out,
ran straight ahead without need of steering or holding, and gripped the
ground so firmly that it could hardly be thrown out at the end of the furrow.

Our breaker turned a furrow two feet wide, and on our best land, where
the sod was toughest, held so firm a grip that at the end of the field
my brother, who was driving the oxen, had to come to my assistance in throwing
it over on its side to be drawn around the end of the landing; and it was
all I could do to set it up again. But I learned to keep that plough in
such trim that after I got started on a new furrow I used to ride on the
crossbar between the handles with my feet resting comfortably on the beam,
without having to steady or steer it in any way on the whole length of
the field, unless we had to go round a stump, for it sawed through the
biggest grubs without flinching.

The growth of these grubs was interesting to me. When an acorn or hickory-nut
had sent up its first season’s sprout, a few inches long, it was burned
off in the autumn grass fires; but the root continued to hold on to life,
formed a callus over the wound and sent up one or more shoots the next
spring. Next autumn these new shoots were burned off, but the root and
calloused head, about level with the surface of the ground, continued to
grow and send up more new shoots; and so on, almost every year until very
old, probably far more than a century, while the tops, which would naturally
have become tall broad-headed trees, were only mere sprouts seldom more
than two years old. Thus the ground was kept open like a prairie, with
only five or six trees to the acre, which had escaped the fire by having
the good fortune to grow on a bare spot at the door of a fox or badger
den, or between straggling grass-tufts wide apart on the poorest sandy
soil.

The uniformly rich soil of the Illinois and Wisconsin prairies produced
so close and tall a growth of grasses for fires that no tree could live
on it. Had there been no fires, these fine prairies, so marked a feature
of the country, would have been covered by the heaviest forests. As soon
as the oak openings in our neighborhood were settled, and the farmers had
prevented running grass-fires, the grubs grew up into trees
and formed tall thickets so dense that it was difficult to walk through
them and every trace of the sunny “openings” vanished.

THE HICKORY HILL HOUSE, BUILT IN 1857

We called our second farm Hickory Hill, from its many fine hickory trees
and the long gentle slope leading up to it. Compared with Fountain Lake
farm it lay high and dry. The land was better, but it had no living water,
no spring or stream or meadow or lake. A well ninety feet deep had to be
dug, all except the first ten feet or so in fine-grained sandstone. When
the sandstone was struck, my father, on the advice of a man who had worked
in mines, tried to blast the rock; but from lack of skill the blasting
went on very slowly, and father decided to have me do all the work with
mason’s chisels, a long, hard job, with a good deal of danger in it. I
had to sit cramped in a space about three feet in diameter, and wearily
chip, chip, with heavy hammer and chisels from early morning until dark,
day after day, for weeks and months. In the morning, father and David lowered
me in a wooden bucket by a windlass, hauled up what chips were left from
the night before, then went away to the farm work and left me until noon,
when they hoisted me out for dinner. After dinner I was promptly lowered
again, the forenoon’s accumulation of chips hoisted out of the
way, and I was left until night.

One morning, after the dreary bore was about eighty feet deep, my life
was all but lost in deadly choke-damp,—carbonic acid gas that had settled
at the bottom during the night. Instead of clearing away the chips as usual
when I was lowered to the bottom, I swayed back and forth and began to
sink under the poison. Father, alarmed that I did not make any noise, shouted,
“What’s keeping you so still?” to which he got no reply. Just
as I was settling down against the side of the wall, I happened to catch
a glimpse of a branch of a bur-oak tree which leaned out over the mouth
of the shaft. This suddenly awakened me, and to father’s excited shouting
I feebly murmured, “Take me out.” But when he began to hoist
he found I was not in the bucket and in wild alarm shouted, “Get in!
Get in the bucket and hold on! Hold on!” Somehow I managed to get
into the bucket, and that is all I remembered until I was dragged out,
violently gasping for breath.

One of our near neighbors, a stone mason and miner by the name of William
Duncan, came to see me, and after hearing the particulars of the accident
he solemnly said: “Weel, Johnnie, it’s God’s mercy that you’re alive.
Many a companion of mine have I seen dead with choke-damp, but
none that I ever saw or heard of was so near to death in it as you were
and escaped without help.” Mr. Duncan taught father to throw water
down the shaft to absorb the gas, and also to drop a bundle of brush or
hay attached to a light rope, dropping it again and again to carry down
pure air and stir up the poison. When, after a day or two, I had recovered
from the shock, father lowered me again to my work, after taking the precaution
to test the air with a candle and stir it up well with a brush-and-hay
bundle. The weary hammer-and-chisel-chipping went on as before, only more
slowly, until ninety feet down, when at last I struck a fine, hearty gush
of water. Constant dropping wears away stone. So does constant chipping,
while at the same time wearing away the chipper. Father never spent an
hour in that well. He trusted me to sink it straight and plumb, and I did,
and built a fine covered top over it, and swung two iron-bound buckets
in it from which we all drank for many a day.

The honey-bee arrived in America long before we boys did, but several
years passed ere we noticed any on our farm. The introduction of the honey-bee
into flowery America formed a grand epoch in bee history. This sweet humming
creature, companion and friend of the flowers, is now distributed
over the greater part
of the continent, filling countless hollows in rocks and trees with
honey as well as the millions of hives prepared for them by honey-farmers,
who keep and tend their flocks of sweet winged cattle, as shepherds keep
sheep,—a charming employment, “like directing sunbeams,” as
Thoreau says. The Indians call the honey-bee the white man’s fly; and though
they had long been acquainted with several species of bumblebees that yielded
more or less honey, how gladly surprised they must have been when they
discovered that, in the hollow trees where before they had found only coons
or squirrels, they found swarms of brown flies with fifty or even a hundred
pounds of honey sealed up in beautiful cells. With their keen hunting senses
they of course were not slow to learn the habits of the little brown immigrants
and the best methods of tracing them to their sweet homes, however well
hidden. During the first few years none were seen on our farm, though we
sometimes heard father’s hired men talking about “lining bees.”
None of us boys ever found a bee tree, or tried to find any until about
ten years after our arrival in the woods. On the Hickory Hill farm there
is a ridge of moraine material, rather dry, but flowery with goldenrods
and asters of many species, upon which we saw bees feeding in
the late autumn just when their hives were fullest of honey, and it occurred
to me one day after I was of age and my own master that I must try to find
a bee tree. I made a little box about six inches long and four inches deep
and wide; bought half a pound of honey, went to the goldenrod hill, swept
a bee into the box and closed it. The lid had a pane of glass in it so
I could see when the bee had sucked its fill and was ready to go home.
At first it groped around trying to get out, but, smelling the honey, it
seemed to forget everything else, and while it was feasting I carried the
box and a small sharp-pointed stake to an open spot, where I could see
about me, fixed the stake in the ground, and placed the box on the flat
top of it. When I thought that the little feaster must be about full, I
opened the box, but it was in no hurry to fly. It slowly crawled up to
the edge of the box, lingered a minute or two cleaning its legs that had
become sticky with honey, and when it took wing, instead of making what
is called a bee-line for home, it buzzed around the box and minutely examined
it as if trying to fix a clear picture of it in its mind so as to be able
to recognize it when it returned for another load, then circled around
at a little distance as if looking for something to locate it by. I was
the nearest object, and the thoughtful worker buzzed in front
of my face and took a good stare at me, and then flew up on to the top
of an oak on the side of the open spot in the centre of which the honey-box
was. Keeping a keen watch, after a minute or two of rest or wing-cleaning,
I saw it fly in wide circles round the tops of the trees nearest the honey-box,
and, after apparently satisfying itself, make a bee-line for the hive.
Looking endwise on the line of flight, I saw that what is called a bee-line
is not an absolutely straight line, but a line in general straight made
of many slight, wavering, lateral curves. After taking as true a bearing
as I could, I waited and watched. In a few minutes, probably ten, I was
surprised to see that bee arrive at the end of the outleaning limb of the
oak mentioned above, as though that was the first point it had fixed in
its memory to be depended on in retracing the way back to the honey-box.
From the tree-top it came straight to my head, thence straight to the box,
entered without the least hesitation, filled up and started off after the
same preparatory dressing and taking of beatings as before. Then I took
particular pains to lay down the exact course so I would be able to trace
it to the hive. Before doing so, however, I made all experiment to test
the worth of the impression I had that the little insect found
the way back to the box by fixing telling points in its mind. While it
was away, I picked up the honey-box and set it on the stake a few rods
from the position it had thus far occupied, and stood there watching. In
a few minutes I saw the bee arrive at its guide-mark, the overleaping branch
on the tree-top, and thence come bouncing down right to the spaces in the
air which had been occupied by my head and the honey-box, and when the
cunning little honey-gleaner found nothing there but empty air it whirled
round and round as if confused and lost; and although I was standing with
the open honey-box within fifty or sixty feet of the former feasting-spot,
it could not, or at least did not, find it.

Now that I had learned the general direction of the hive, I pushed on
in search of it. I had gone perhaps a quarter of a mile when I caught another
bee, which, after getting loaded, went through the same performance of
circling round and round the honey-box, buzzing in front of me and staring
me in the face to be able to recognize me; but as if the adjacent trees
and bushes were sufficiently well known, it simply looked around at them
and bolted off without much dressing, indicating, I thought, that the distance
to the hive was not great. I followed on and very soon discovered it in
the bottom log of a corn-field fence, but some lucky fellow
had discovered it before me and robbed it. The robbers had chopped a large
hole in the log, taken out most of the honey, and left the poor bees late
in the fall, when winter was approaching, to make haste to gather all the
honey they could from the latest flowers to avoid starvation in the winter.